Regeneration of cofactors for use in biocatalysis.

Cofactor-dependent enzymes catalyze many synthetically useful reactions. The high cost of cofactors, however, necessitates in situ cofactor regeneration for preparative applications. After two decades of research, several cofactors can now be effectively regenerated using enzyme or whole-cell based methods. Significant advances have been made in this area in the past three years and include the development of novel or improved methods for regenerating ATP, sugar nucleotides and 3-phosphoadenosine-5'-phosphosulphate. These approaches have found novel applications in biocatalysis.